The Long Party

In 1920 America staggered out of a world war and a plague, exhausted and grieving. Within a few short years it was throwing the loudest, richest, most extravagant party in its history. The nation put itself on wheels, wired its homes for electricity, gathered around the radio, and learned — for the first time — to buy now and pay later. Jazz poured out of Harlem and Chicago and conquered the world. Flappers bobbed their hair and claimed the vote. A young man flew alone across an ocean and came down into the arms of the modern age.

E.B Cohen tells the whole sweep of that improbable decade in one gripping volume. Here is Henry Ford and his terrible, miraculous assembly line; Al Capone and the crime empire that Prohibition accidentally built; Louis Armstrong lifting a cornet and changing music forever; the flapper, the Klansman, the bootlegger, and the speculator, all somehow inhabiting the same ten years. And here, beneath the glamour, is the machinery that actually made the twenties roar — the credit, the advertising, the mass media, the assembly line — and the shadows the party never quite hid: the farmers and workers left behind, the immigrants turned away, the racism and the reaction, and the fragile, leveraged boom that ended on a bright October morning in the greatest crash the world had seen.

Even-handed, vivid, and unflinching, this is the story of the first modern decade — glamorous and dark, exhilarating and cautionary — and of why, a century later, it is still the story of ourselves.